


Snow

by ecphrasis



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Arranged Marriage, F/M, Heavy Angst, Introspection, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 16:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12656817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecphrasis/pseuds/ecphrasis
Summary: He was the middle son, she remembers. He was indulged in his fantasies. He was allowed to believe in things like happiness. (She wants to believe in it so desperately it hurts.)





	Snow

Snow

On their wedding night it is not her name Lord Stark mutters when he spends inside her. Had he managed (thought?  _known?_ ) to bring her pleasure, she knows his own would not have touched her lips. The word he mutters is sibilant, guttural, and she knows it will not do to dwell on it. She cannot fault him for the faithlessness of his mind when she was never supposed to be his. He was supposed to have freedom. The  _asss_ _hhh_  sound he makes is like a secret, the breathy  _arah_  like a prayer. Her own prayer, the one she murmurs when he leaves her, the one she cries out in pleasure and in agony, is sharp, hard, impossible, the one she was taught to speak from childhood. She remembers playing marriage with Petyr by the water. Even then, her prince's name was Brandon.

When he returns they present each other with their children. The war is over, the dragons defeated, and in their place the stag reigns over Westeros. In her place is his son, a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy, dark as a raven. Her own child is red and ebullient and loud and merry, but her icy lord husband's son mirrors most perfectly his character. He insists the boys be kept together, he insists on cosseting them both. Her heart would be warmed by his dedication to the children, if only one of them were not some stranger's babe.

At night, when his gentle knock opens her door, she permits him to do his duty. The times are uncertain yet, and he has only one child (only one  _true_  child, only one son who will inherit, this she swears. She'd rather rip her womb out than allow her future children to share their father's inheritance with one not born of her flesh.). He is careful with her, always and unfailingly. It's like he hopes to mend her with his touch. She is not so foolish. (How could he know she is broken?) He is silent when they are together, as quiet as she, except for the occasional sigh or moan that she imagines burn him worse than fire. She comes to live for these signs of humanity in her strange, northern lord with his strange, northern child. Her son learns how to talk, his does not. She hopes he's mute.

The days since his return slip into weeks, and the weeks to months. It is winter in the North, and that means she is cold. The walls are warmed by water from hot springs, fires blaze in the grates, rushes keep the damp from the floor, but still she shivers.

She is cold inside too.

One night he drinks more than is wise, and he presses his lips to her own. He tastes of wine and winter and the mutton they ate for supper, and when his mouth touches her neck she sits upright. The image of Brandon kneeling over her beside the river is too painful. She came to Lord Stark's bed a maiden, he knows this, but he must also know that she and Brandon were engaged as children, and when he visited her they took what liberties they could. They thought themselves free. He is so like and unlike his brother. His touch is rougher, less assured. Brandon knew his way around her body, and she knew he had not possessed his brother's sense of  _honor_. (She also knows that had Brandon fathered a bastard, the child would have lived comfortably enough, so far from Winterfell that she'd never have cause to lay eyes on it. She would not be reminded daily of her husband's betrayal.) He does not quite know what to do with himself, he has not grown into his winter-hardened body.

"My lord Stark," she says. "You needn't." She's still in her slip (he likes her clothed, or else he would rather imagine a different body beneath her nightdress), and the candles have yet to be extinguished (he doesn't join with her unless he's certain no one, not even he, can see what it is they do). He pulls back and it isn't hard to read the hurt in his eyes, and beyond that, something akin to fear. She is a new country to him, one whose borders he does not understand, whose boundaries he cannot see. Brandon, she realizes, must have told him how her eyes rolled back in pleasure when they kissed. He must know the secrets of her body from his brother's lips. She wonders if, in the dark hours of the night, this eats at him. She wonders if this is why he has a child.

She is not so foolish as to believe that. She is foolish enough to want it to be true. She remembers the name he whispered on their wedding night.  _Ashara_. They say she jumped from a tower when Lord Stark rode into Starfall, bringing with him her dead brother's sword.

They say she bore a son.

"Forgive me," he says, and the way he says it makes her wonder if he is not, in his own way, apologizing for everything. "I only thought you might enjoy-"

"There's no pleasure to be found in duty, my lord Stark," she says, and she is aware of how her words wound him. She wonders how he could have forgotten this long enough to father a child. He doesn't seem capable of it, here in her bed, hurt and confusion and anger and  _pain_  etched on his long, not-uncomely face. He's not handsome, like Brandon, but the harsh lines of his body have something in keeping with a mountain, majestic and proud, aloof and icy,  _stark_ in their loveliness. He could be a King of Winter.

Robb, his child, is so unlike him as to make her fear his ire. Men put aside children they do not think are theirs. If he has questions, he keeps them silent. Robb is his. She wishes he (and she) were Brandon's.

"Forgive me," he says again, and she wonders who he thinks she is, that he would beg her pardon. Doesn't he know she's as good as his captive here, far away in the North? (The tales say the wildlings stole southern women to warm their beds.) She's removed from kin and home and all that is familiar. (Except for Robb. She allows her son her own breasts, she feeds him her own milk. She thinks wryly, bitterly, on occasion, that at least one Stark should enjoy them.) (He does not touch her there. He does not even look at her.) (At times she wonders if he looks at women at all. She knows some men prefer men to women.) (The bastard raises more questions than answers.)

"I'm yours to command, my lord Stark." His face crumbles like an avalanche, and she takes pity on him. She grew up used to breaking hearts (she broke Petyr's slowly, over so many years that she became a river, wearing him down to nothingness, etching her shape into his soul), she grew up wanting only Brandon. It is not his fault he cannot be what she was meant to have. (As it is, he is closer than any other could be. At least she is Lady Stark, and not Lady Baratheon, or worse, Lady Frey (even Lady Lannister was a possibility; Lord Tywin has no wife.) (Even these men, hard and cruel and lustful, would never bring a bastard to their keep.) "But it did feel nice," she relents. "I only meant that if you did not wish to do so, you needn't." He kisses her again, and although he does not quite know what to do with his tongue, his earnestness feels good. His fumbling touch is less impressive than his intent. His gift to her is like a child's, one given in innocence and from goodness. He does not bring her pleasure, but she pretends, and that is her gift to him. Brandon learned. He might too.

He comes to her more frequently after that, and she begins to find his kisses less offensive. He learns restraint (her icy lord does not struggle with this concept), and he learns to touch her as she likes to be touched. If, on occasion, a sigh slips from her lips that is not quite a sigh, a sound that starts soft  _Bhhhrrraaannnn_  and ends with a thudding, final  _dun_ , he does not notice. She cannot make him care, she finds, and this hurts as much (almost as much) as the bastard. One night she moans his brother's name deliberately, loudly, clear as ice water, and he does not falter, does not react.

A lesser man (a greater one?) ( _Brandon?_ ) might strike her for this.

Afterwards he rises from her, and flings open the window, allowing shards of ice to penetrate the room. "I always wanted to be my brother," he says. "Now I have his castle and his title and his armies and his woman. Don't you think I want to be mistaken for him?" Brandon would have said whore, not woman, she realizes. He looks so forlorn, so lost, that it's impossible to forget his father and brother were burned alive, his sister raped until she died. (She wonders, suddenly, if that explains his formality. Does he fear, each time he comes to her, that what Lyanna felt, she feels? Does he think himself a monster in the dark? Does he imagine she weeps over his touch?) (She's not so foolish as that. She knows how very unwise it would be to refuse him with either body or mind.) It's easy to forget the bastard, who still has yet to speak.

"I was raised to love him," she says, as if this excuses what she has done to him, as if this explains her cruelty.

"So was I," he says. He pulls up his trousers and makes to shut the window.

"Don't go," she says, on impulse. They have not spent the night together since their wedding night. "Please, I don't enjoy sleeping alone. The wind howls and I feel afraid." This he knows how to handle: he can be the savior. She's found he's more comfortable when he can act the hero. It's the grey areas, the difficult choices, that he cannot make. (He made the choice to fuck a woman not his wife and get her with child.)

"Very well," he says. He complains of the heat of her bedchambers. She is not bold enough to suggest his as an alternative. Perhaps he cannot stomach the thought of bringing a Southron girl into his Northern bed.

After that she does not say his brother's name again.

In time, she finds she can go whole days without thinking of him.

When she does think of him, it's not the sharp pain it was in the beginning. It's a dull ache, like an old wound that might someday heal.

It's the bastard that's hateful to her.

She is a girl of not-yet-nineteen, and already she has failed. (A part of her knows this is unfair. He failed her.) (A part of her knows that if she presented him with a bastard son, she'd be dead.) A deeper part knows this is not the truth.

She grows used to his visits. Sometimes he speaks to her (with her?), and this emboldens her. She does not feel cheap (used) (useless) when he asks her opinion on food or storage or a quarreling set of little lords. At first he did it because he had nothing else to talk about, but she had been Lady Tully for years before she became Lady Stark. She knows how to run a castle, he does not. He is lord enough to acknowledge to her experience, even if he rarely listens. He often tells her that things are done differently in the North. He says this with the confidence of one who has never been contradicted. He is the middle son, permitted his eccentricities. He was allowed to believe in things like honor. (Surely now, the father of a bastard son, the defiler of his marriage bed, he realizes there's no such thing?)

His brother, Benjen Stark, is a curiosity she does not understand. In many ways he's like a child, but her husband is fiercely protective of him. It seems unbecoming to have an unwed man in their castle (she knows what the whispers will say, when they start: she's gone through two Stark brothers, why not the third?), but she likes Benjen, and she supposes he likes her, in his own way. He and her husband do not discuss their father or brother or sister, but he does seem fond of her husband's sons (true-born and bastard both, and equally. What's the point of marriage if any issue is accepted?)

When he announces his desire to join the Night's Watch, her husband says nothing, only rises from his half-finished dinner and sulks off to some corner of the castle. (He goes to hold his children, both of them. He always picks Robb up first, but he puts the bastard down last, and when he kisses him, she knows he loved (loves?) his mother dearly.) When he finds her, he does not take her to bed, but instead asks when she intends to have another child.

"Would you consult Maester Luwin about my likely days, my lord Stark?" she asks, sweetly, and this silences him. He would never dream of asking such a question.

The castle seems more somber without Benjen. Now it is only herself and Lord Stark and their son (and his). It should be a merry time, but more often than not, he's morose and bitter. He spends hours in the godswood, and she bends her knees before the stone walls of her chamber. There is no sept in Winterfell.

She was raised to be his brother's wife. She does not know how she can become his.

He has learned how she likes being touched, but he is not so daring as Brandon. Brandon used to kiss all over her body (he used to bury his face in her cunt until she screamed). Brandon knew how to make her weak. Brandon knew how to make her love him.

His child learns to talk, and soon he and her son go wandering all over the castle. Her boy is good natured. His is eternally in the way. Whenever she turns around, it seems, she finds her husband's grey eyes staring at her from a long, northern face.

Already the child knows that she is not someone to provide him with comfort.

This makes her glad. (It is not his fault, he did not ask to be born.)

"I want to make you happy, my lady," he says to her.

"I am happy, my Lord Stark," she says.

"Ned," he says, softly. "My family calls me Ned." Her eyes well with tears, and he looks at her uncomfortably. He does not understand what those words mean, so far from keep and kin.

"Are you well, my lady?"

"Cat," she says, her chest restricted by the sudden joy she feels. "My family calls me Cat."

After that, is it easier. He comes to her bed irregularly, and although he leaves her nightdress on and insists on extinguishing the candles, he allows them both more freedom. On occasion he lies beside her when he finishes, sweaty and gasping, although he opens the window to allow the cold in. She doesn't mind his touch either, she finds. (A part of her, the part that enjoyed secreting herself with Brandon in a hayloft or by the river, enjoys it.)

One night, they talk about his father. She imagines Jon Arryn made him into the man he is, but he loved his father, and she imagines that, in his aloof, Stark, way, he loved him back.

They do not discuss Brandon. (He tolerates no mention of Lyanna.)

She knows her way around the castle, and her son is weaned. He has lived to be almost two, so she has hopes he will survive to be a man. The first year is the most dangerous. Afterwards, there is room for hope. She knows the Northern lords on sight, she knows the genealogy of House Stark. She knows her husband lusts for her, which is close enough to love.

She watches, but she sees no sign of his unfaithfulness.

When she finds her pleasure, alone or with him, Brandon is not always at the forefront of her mind. Sometimes it is Eddard Stark she imagines.

When she conceives it is a winter's winter, and the child sits upon her stomach and falls stagnant. When her blood comes, four months later, he takes her into his arms, almost as though he understood.

He rises to see to his son.

Afterwards, when she sits in the feeble sunlight and pretends to embroider, when she tries to write letters to Lysa or her father or Edmure, when she plays with Robb, the thought of his arms is always present.

He held her and demanded nothing.

He gave her comfort.

She wonders if he would soothe her pride as he soothed her sorrows.

She wonders about the bastard's mother.

He is kept from her bed for four months, to ensure her body heals and she is able to conceive again. She fears this will send him in search of another, but although she watches him in secret, he does not betray her. There is not one hour of his day she cannot account for. She determines that the bastard was simply a mistake. He was with Robert at the time, after all, and Robert has an unnatural hold over her husband. If he was drunk and with his friend, he might not have known what was happening until it was too late. It was some whore, probably. (If it was Ashara, would that be worse or better?)

She asks him about it, and although she knows Ned would never strike his wife, Lord Stark comes close. He rises from her pliant, willing body, suddenly a man of ice. "Ned," she had whispered. "Tell me who his mother is. Was it Ashara?" He has a countenance of stone, and beneath the stone, fury. (Beneath the fury there is sorrow, but she can only see a glimmer of that before it vanishes.)

"Do not ever question me, Lady Tully," he says, and she realizes he has never called her  _Lady Stark_. "Do not  _ever_  ask me about the boy or his mother."

"Ned, I-"

"As your lord I command it," he snaps, and she sees Brandon in him at last, in his unbridled rage, in her fear of him. "Do not talk to me of his mother or you will regret it." Ned would never hurt her, Ned enjoys kissing her, Ned might even love her (or love fucking her, and there is not that much difference). Lord Stark, she imagines, would gladly beat her senseless. (She would rather he hit her than treat her with this coldness. At least if he hit her, he would be touching her.)

"Ned," she says.

"I will be rid of you," he says, and his words are ice, but what he says next freezes her blood. "Robb does not look like a Stark." And her heart collapses. She does not think he meant to threaten her child, but the threat is there nonetheless. You might well have borne me a bastard, he suggests. I could kill you. I could put him aside. Jon Snow might inherit Winterfell.

"Robb is yours-" she protests, and she can hear the high terror in her voice.

"As you are. Do not speak of it. And Catelyn?" She looks at him, and despite herself she feels her tears rising. "Catelyn." His voice is hard, cruel. (She hears Brandon in its steel.)

"Lord Stark?" Her voice quavers and breaks, and Ned, who does not touch her for fear of bruising her, is mindless of it.

"If my son dies, you will answer for it. Do you understand?" There is such a coldness in his tone that she begins to weep. He does not relent. "Do you understand?"

He has broken her, she realizes. All his caution with her is nothing, he knows (perhaps he always knew) how to ravage. "I understand, my lord."

"That is good." He does not lie with her that night. He abandons her to her fears and terrors and doubts. He does not come to her bed for one week, then two. She understands that he will always remain apart from her, that he will never visit her again. He, a man with two sons, requires no more children. If he asks Robert, the bastard will be named Stark. Lord Stark does not require her body. Lord Stark does not require her.

All the same, he does not betray her bed with others.

She goes to him, red-faced and humiliated, and they do not speak of what occurred. He thrusts into her and kisses her, and she understands what this marriage means. They are not equals; they will never be equals. The bastard will always mean more to him than her. When the time comes and he is forced to choose, his decision will be made.

She cries out when his fingers find the nub between her legs, and the thought of Brandon comes again. Brandon too knew this casual cruelty. Brandon too made her weep. (Brandon too forced her to humble herself; Brandon broke her pride and made her beg for him.) Lord Stark spends his seed within her, a gift to her.

If she is lucky, she will be allowed to bear his children.

When she calls him Lord Stark he lifts his eyebrows, a sign of his displeasure. "Ned, Catelyn, I have asked you to call me Ned." She wants to cry, but she knows her tears will displease him more, and she cannot bear the thought that he will reject her. This forced intimacy is worse than she could have imagined mere words to be.

"Ned," she says, when she sees him in the hallway and he refuses to greet her. "Ned, please, forgive me."

"For what?" he asks, but there is intent behind his question.

"Forgive me for prying," she says. "I was foolish, it was not my place."

"No, it was not," he says. "All the same, I forgive you. I ask your apology too." She stares at him, shocked. "It is not becoming in a man to threaten his inferiors," he says, and every word drives a dagger into her soul. He has no political finesse, he is so blunt, but she has no doubt he understands all the connotations of what he says.

"Thank you, Lord Stark," she says.

"Ned," he corrects again, and it is a command. "I will see you tonight." She knows she is dismissed, so she bows her head and leaves him to his work. When he comes to her chambers he disrobes her, and he is perhaps more harsh than usual. He drags his name from her unwilling lips, he makes her beg for him. She realizes, when he rises and opens her window, that he has more power over her than that of a lord over a lady. When he lies beside her and she begins to weep, she sees the look of horror that enters his face. He's will wound her with his words, but he can't stand the thought he's harmed her body. When he asks her what's wrong, she's tempted to lie, to hurt him as he hurt her, to tell him his touch is what has reduced her to this weeping mess, but it wouldn't be the truth. (The truth is she enjoys his wild nature, his wolf-like snarls, his desire for her.)

"I want you," she says. She weeps because she knows he cannot (will not) love her. She weeps because she knows after everything she has suffered, love is pathetic and wrong, it should be impossible.

"Catelyn," he says, and his voice is soft, breathless. "Catelyn, I want you too." She meets his gaze and finds honesty there, and he kisses her gently, softly. "Oh Cat," he murmurs. "Oh Cat, I want us to be happy."

"We can be," she says.

"We will be," he affirms, as though he could command it of the world. He was the middle son, she remembers. He was indulged in his fantasies. He was allowed to believe in things like happiness. (She wants to believe in it so desperately it hurts.)

He catches her kneeling before her stone wall one evening.

"Are you well, Cat?" he asks, as she bends her forehead to the floor in reverential prayer.

"Yes, my lord," she says. "I'm simply praying."

"There is a godswood," he says, confused, and she feels a surge of anger that she cannot explain. It is her duty to accommodate her husband, it is his to get her with child. He does not need to know her faith, she should keep no faith but his.

"I follow the Seven, my lord," she says, and she sees the knowledge dawn on his long, grey face.

"Have you no images to bow before?" he asks.

She came to his castle with nothing but a child and a few summer dresses.

"I know my prayers well enough, my lord," she says, and he frowns, but she rises and puts on a smile, even though her knees and back and thighs ache. "And one of them has been answered. I'm glad to see you, Lord Stark."

Sometimes she called Brandon  _Lord Stark_  because she coveted his title. She was overeager to share it, to be the wife of the Lord Paramount of the North, to have importance. Now that she is  _Lady Stark_  she does not know what to make of herself. She feels like a foundling when the Northern lords come to visit her cold and unrelenting husband. They eye her when they think she isn't watching, they speak the language of snow and ice and biting wind. Her husband shuts the door, and they vanish to discuss the Boltons or the dwindling food supply or the hope of spring.

She has a hope too.

When she tells Eddard Stark she is with child, he allows himself a smile, but she sees the worry in his eyes. The last time it did not end well. This time it might well be worse.

Still, the winter is lessening. It seems to grow less dark day by day, and all the puddles begin to form from ice, as the child within her is molded, a babe of the North.

She prays daily for a son, for a child to put another step between the lordship of Winterfell and the odious bastard, who knows already that she is to be called Lady Stark. Robb touches her swollen belly adoringly, and when the child kicks, he pulls back, his face a mask of confusion and wonder. Eddard Stark laughs at his child's bewilderment, but when he touches her stomach and the babe kicks, she sees the same expression mirrored in his face. (The bastard, she imagines, is playing with Robb's toys in Robb's room.)

When she is brought to bed of her babe, she is reminded of the terror and the pain that accompanied Robb's birth. She pushes and pants and even as the child rips itself from her body, she wonders which body her husband's bastard came from. She fears dying. She fears she will never know the truth.

It is a girl, and her husband is allowed into her room, which stinks of blood and musk and afterbirth, a fresh smell, a living, dank, rank, tumbling smell. He looks at his babe, and she sees a softening that is by now familiar, she sees what he allows only Robb and the bastard to see. He smiles as he gazes upon his wailing child, and when she reaches for it he reluctantly hands it back.

"Where are you going?" she asks, when he makes to leave her chamber. She fears the blood and sweat and disarray has made him uncomfortable.

"The bells of Wintertown must be rung," he says.

She knows enough about his family to know that daughters are not celebrated like sons. (She knows enough about him to know he does not care for tradition, not truly.) (He is the middle son, he was allowed to believe ridiculous stories; he was indulged in sentimentalism.) (He fought a war over Lyanna.)

She can hear the bells even over the babe, and Ned brings Robb to greet his sister. "There's so much noise," he says, wonderingly.

"You have to look after your mother and sister now." Ned tells him, seriously.

"And Jon," Robb says. "Him too."

She meets her husband's eyes, over the squalling of his trueborn daughter.

"Yes Robb," he says. He looks down. (He betrays her.) "Jon too."

The ice of the north has invaded her chamber. (Outside, the last snow of the season has begun to fall.)


End file.
